Categories
Historical Fiction

THE COLD MILLIONS by Jess Walter

I joined the IWW in 2005 because of a comic book (WOBBLIES! A GRAPHIC HISTORY OF THE INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD, edited by Paul Buhle and Nicole Schulman) and have remained a member in good standing ever since (X number 358133). Of course I already knew the IWW from Steinbeck and Dos Passos, and the Wobblies were considered heroes by many on the left during the 1960s. As income inequality worsens and we sink deeper and deeper into a new Gilded Age, I carry my Red Card with pride.

A few years before I joined the One Big Union, I had discovered a writer named Jess Walter, a former reporter from Spokane, WA. His first novel, OVER TUMBLED GRAVES (2001), was an atmospheric, convincing, and beautifully written police procedural, which looked to be the start of a series. Walter, however, had other plans. His detective character spent most of Walter’s second novel on the sidelines, and has not appeared since. His third novel, CITIZEN VINCE (2005), would probably have won me over more completely if I didn’t have such an aversion to mobsters.

Walter hit the big time (deservedly) with his next, THE ZERO (2006), the CATCH-22 of 9/11 (featuring a prescient evisceration of Rudy Giuliani). As in CATCH-22, what at first seems darkly hilarious turns heartbreaking by the finish; otherwise, it bears little resemblance to any other book I’ve ever read. And speaking of prescience, THE FINANCIAL LIVES OF THE POETS (2009) has to be the first novel to confront the crisis of 2008 head-on, boundless in its compassion for the victims of what the IWW used to call “the Trusts,” Big Business and Wall Street and all the other faceless demons of predatory capitalism.

I will skip lightly over BEAUTIFUL RUINS (2012), his mega-bestseller, which is also the only one of his novels to leave me cold. I’m just not a fan of Hollywood satire–too easy a target, in my reckoning. I was excited, then, to learn that after an eight-year gap he had published THE COLD MILLIONS (2020), a novel about the IWW and the Spokane Free Speech Riots of 1909-1910.

I had some trepidation. It’s a challenge to write a novel where good and evil are so clearly delineated, and where evil has all the power. Octavia Butler’s KINDRED, for example, or Ballard’s EMPIRE OF THE SUN. I feared a long slog through police beatings, hunger strikes, and unrelieved misery. Instead, Walter presents the main narrative through the viewpoint of Ryan “Rye” Dolan, nearly 17, and devoted to his older brother and fellow hobo, Gig. During their tramping around the Pacific Northwest, Gig has fallen under the spell of the IWW and is full of revolutionary zeal. Rye, meanwhile, remains on the margins–at least at the outset.

Breaking up Rye’s narrative are chunks of first-person testimony from other major and minor characters, each with a distinctive voice and a piece of the overall puzzle: cops, tramps, anarchists, housewives, unionists, fixers, Ursula the Great, and Gig himself. Rather than slowing the plot, these sections serve as accelerants to keep the reader emotionally engaged from start to finish.

The Spokane of THE COLD MILLIONS is both microcosm and one of a kind. Lemuel Brand, the (fictitious) robber-baron villain of the book, stands for Cornelius Vanderbilt and J. P. Morgan and Henry Ford, yet is tortured by a fear that is uniquely his own. The treatment Gig receives at the hands of the Spokane police is typical of the times even as Gig himself–alcoholic, impulsive, helpless to resist his wanderlust–is completely his own man. The IWW organizers John Walsh and Frank Little carry on the tradition of Joe Hill and Mother Jones, yet became heroes themselves in Spokane.

Walsh and Little are among a number of historical figures who appear in THE COLD MILLIONS, along with acting police chief John Sullivan, lawyer Fred Moore, and, most memorably, the Rebel Girl herself, Elizabeth Gurly Flynn, married, pregnant, and traveling alone, with whom Rye cannot help falling unrequitedly in love. Gurley’s firebrand speeches on behalf of the IWW ignite the plot of the book as they did the historical riots. Walter seamlessly integrates fact and fiction, and admirably tries to separate them again in his acknowledgements.

Period details are rich and evocative, the appropriate slang sprinkled in judiciously, with only a very few moments that felt anachronistic. Otherwise the clothes, décor, personal hygiene, mores, and politics all rang true.

As a prose stylist, Walter has always been clean and vivid, writing in the rhythm and vocabulary of his viewpoint characters. He’s only gotten better over the years. There’s scene in THE COLD MILLIONS where Gurly faces down a homicidal mob that is a marvel of ventriloquism and a master class in how to write a soliloquy. As a delineator of character, he finds humanity where you least expect it. As a plotter, he is more than happy to deploy the skills he honed as a thriller writer. He’s said in interviews that he considers suspense fully compatible with literature, and THE COLD MILLIONS is proof.

You would be hard pressed to find a historical novel with more relevance to the oligarchy we are living under right now. Walter’s novel ends in 1964, with the testimony of one last surviving character, wishing for something he could say to his children and grandchildren that would sum up what he’s learned. “Something that would open their hearts and create in them an unassailable courage, a generosity of spirit, faith in humanity.”

That something, of course, is THE COLD MILLIONS.

Categories
Contemporary Novels

WE ARE ALL THE SAME IN THE DARK by Julia Heaberlin

Toward the end of WE ARE ALL THE SAME IN THE DARK, a character muses: “If everybody’s holes were as obvious as a missing body part, what would the word disabled even mean?” Out of context that may sound a bit pat. In context, I found myself in tears.

What an amazing, profound, and captivating novel this is. On the level of plot alone, it piles mystery on mystery–two unsolved murders in the past; a one-eyed girl who appears out of nowhere, refusing to speak; a crazy and possibly homicidal recluse; and what is it with those dandelions? The prose, if a bit hyperbolic here and there, is musical and vivid and precise, with distinct voices for the different narrators. And the characters. Oh, my, the characters. Flawed, broken, tough, vulnerable, and deep. Their pasts are richly detailed, so much so that I felt like I could pick a date at random and Heaberlin could tell me what each of them was doing at any hour of the day.

The opening dozen pages made me worry that this might be a paint-by-the numbers serial killer novel. Heaberlin quickly disabused me of that idea with the first of many plot twists, and the surprises came thick and fast thereafter. If, like me, you love that feeling of weightlessness you get when the rug is pulled out from under you over and over again, you will love this book.

There is so much to admire here. Though there are plenty of secrets to go around, the viewpoint characters play fair–they don’t tease the reader with vital information that they’re withholding for the climax. Heaberlin’s research on prosthetics is completely convincing and full of surprises. That’s true of all her research–the first page of the novel is a disquisition on digging a grave by hand that I wanted to wave in the face of lesser writers who’ve buried corpses in an hour. Anyone who’s planted a tree or put a beloved cat to rest knows better, and that passage forged a confidence in Heaberlin as somebody who cares to get things right.

I used the word “profound” earlier. A common subtext in psychological thrillers (a marketing category that typically means, “It’s a suspense novel, except a woman wrote it”) is the way men use violence to deprive women of their agency. There’s a good deal of that in WE ARE ALL THE SAME, but Heaberlin also shows us damaged men, and lays the blame for both at the boots of their bad and damaged fathers.

Don’t miss this one.

Categories
Picture books

OLLIE BUG AND THE ICKY STICKY THING FROM SPACE! by Tom Serafini

I don’t read a lot of kid’s picture books, but this one has everything I look for in the genre. A sympathetic protagonist (or two), an unpredictable storyline, and a positive message. Which, when you get down to it, is exactly what I look for in an adult book. Plus it has really great illustrations.

It’s the largely autobiographical story of a five-legged spider and his close encounter with a slimy three eyed space alien (Stanley), who crash lands in his back yard. If that doesn’t sound autobiographical to you, you probably haven’t known Tom Serafini as long as I have. You’ll probably not be surprised that Ollie is able to help his new friend get home in time for dinner (almost, anyway). What you may not expect is that the story goes on for another eight pages after the main plot is resolved, because the best stories have more to them than plot.

Let’s talk about the art. Serafini combines inks and watercolors to create definition and character in the foreground while dazzling the eye with sumptuous washes of texture and color in the back. And there are those lovely art-only moments, like the way Stanley manages to deploy two pairs of welder’s goggles between his three eyes, and the casual way the goggles show up again at the very end. Or the comings and goings of the ambulatory flowers.

And I don’t want to forget to mention my favorite character, Ralph the Tree, even though there’s no good place to do it. Hi, Ralph, I hope your head feels better.

 

Order the book from Etsy:
https://etsy.me/37rdNbC  Deluxe hardcover (recommended)
https://etsy.me/33FS7HQ  Trade paperback